nurse. Whatever Gwyneth feared most, it had not been born of man and woman.
MY FATHER HAD SAID THAT WE SHOULD FEAR equally the Fogs and the Clears, that the latter were, in their own way, as terrible as the former, and that we should regard them with wary indifference. Although I never disobeyed my father, although I never met the eyes of a Clear or sought to attract its attention, I did not fear them. In fact, the sight of them continued to make me happy.
To one degree or another, I have been happy most of my life, in part because the world has infinite charms if you wish to see them. Also, the world’s many mysteries fascinate me and inspire in me a hope so profound that I suppose, if I were to express it sincerely and at length in a manuscript more bluntly philosophical than this one, any normal person, those who walk freely in daylight, would find it the work of a Pollyanna and worthy only of ridicule.
Of course I also have periods of sadness, for there is sorrow baked into the clay and stone of which the world is made. Most of those doleful times occurred during the year after Father died, when I found it difficult to be alone after his long companionship.
When I ventured out that night, a little more than five years before I met Gwyneth, I encountered a spectacle so enrapturing that my melancholy melted away. I thought of it as the Convocation. The word felt right to me, though at the time, I didn’t know why.
Past one o’clock in the morning, in an August cooler than most, I came aboveground and discovered Clears everywhere I looked. They wore what they always wore: soft-soled white shoes, loose pants with elastic waists, and shirts with three-quarter sleeves, some all in white, others in soft blue, still others in pale green, as if they were dressed to staff the emergency rooms and surgeries at various hospitals. There were men and women of every race, but all of them seemed to be of roughly the same age, early to mid-thirties. They walked ledges, eight or ten or even more to a single building, and they glowed on rooftops, strolled the sidewalks, proceeded boldly down the center of the street, stood in intersections. In the glass towers that lacked ledges, the Clears were at some windows, radiant, gazing out. They traveled the parks, and I saw them descending the steps to a subway station.
Never before had I seen more than three or four Clears in one night. I was delighted by these multitudes.
They neither spoke to one another nor appeared to be engaged in coordinated activities. Each seemed to be going calmly about his own business, whatever that might be, and some were solemn while others smiled. I felt that they were all listening to something I couldn’t hear, which might mean that they were telepathic and were attuned to one another, though I had no way of knowing.
The few drivers who were out at that hour were oblivious of the luminous crowd. They drove right through some of them, and it was as if both the Clears and the vehicles were mirages, each unaffected by the others, as though they were from different dimensions, combined in this one scene only by virtue of my gifted eyes.
As I moved in wonder, block after block, a few of the Clears looked at me, and in each instance I turned away at once. But in the split second during which our eyes met, I felt every time as though a cube of dry ice had been swiped the length of my spine, the chill so intense that I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover my skin blistered from my topmost vertebra to my coccyx.
They did frighten me then, but only briefly, and I continued to delight in the sight of them. I saw thousands of Clears that night, and never again enjoyed a spectacle like it.
For days afterward, I felt that something new should happen, some event that the city had never played host to before and that no one could have imagined in advance of its occurrence. But time went by, and nothing came to pass that didn’t befall the city’s people every day. I was mildly disappointed until I thought that perhaps the unimaginable episode that I anticipated had been something that the Convocation had been there not to facilitate but to forestall.
And with that realization, I felt the dry ice sliding down my spine again, though not a single Clear was present.
IN THE COMMONS, ON THE FOOTPATH BY THE pond, I waited in a cold that deepened by the minute, thinking I might see the first crystals of ice form on the shallow black water along the shore.
Gwyneth wasn’t late. I was a few minutes early. I hadn’t quite finished picking up all the broken glass and china on her kitchen floor, but all of a sudden I had felt an urgent need to get out of there. I don’t know why. I was overwhelmed by the feeling that when I’d closed the bedroom window, I hadn’t latched it, and that someone or maybe something was at that minute climbing the fire escape and soon to enter the apartment with bad intentions.
So affecting was that intuition, I abandoned caution and left by the front door, went down the communal stairs two at a time, at risk of encountering one of the neighbors, and burst into the night as if I had been blown out of the house by an explosion. There was traffic in the street, but I was hooded and masked and gloved, and I dodged across the lanes to a Gershwin-jazz performance of car horns and shrilling brakes.
Just inside the gate to the Commons, I paused under the great pine where Gwyneth and I had stood the previous night, and looked back toward the house, expecting something to be at her living-room window, but it was just a rectangle of unobstructed light. Hopeful that I had not been seen in flight, I continued to the pond, where now I stood in expectation of the first ice.
Because I had earlier remembered the murdered nurse found in the water and now stood near the spot where she had been pulled to shore by the coroner, pity swelled in me, not just for the dead woman and her family but also for the city, though certainly the city did not want my pity. So tender did this feeling become that I knew I was losing the degree of self-control that I needed every minute that I was aboveground.
When I tried to turn my thoughts away from the nurse, they went unaccountably to the marionette, of all things. As irrational as it may sound, I wondered if the puppet had sat on this shore for part of that grim night, watching her pale body float and the koi bump against it under the mistaken impression that it was a great mass of bread thrown to them by admirers. Seemingly irrational, yes, but the thought became an image in my mind’s eye, and I felt in my bones that it was true, and I wished that I had not come to the Commons sooner than necessary.
Precisely then the first snow frolicked down the sky, flakes as big as rose petals, wheeling through the bleak dark and flaring in the light of the pathway lamps. They vanished into the black water but gathered on the stiff brown grass and on the pavement. So quickly did smaller snowflakes follow the larger ones in such greater numbers that I knew this would be a storm that the city would long remember, whereupon the night breeze stiffened just enough to be called a wind.
When I looked at the dead man’s watch on my wrist, I saw that the moment of our rendezvous had arrived. On time, the Land Rover appeared, following the one-way blacktop service lane, but then she turned off the road and drove across the picnic meadow, to the shore of the pond, switching from headlights to parking lights as she drew near.
The vehicle looked immense, maybe because I knew Gwyneth was petite and I couldn’t quite believe that a hundred-pound girl could maintain control of such a formidable machine. I was also a little spooked because I’d never ridden in a motor vehicle before, only under a tarp on a flatbed and only once.
Sometimes
